Monday, January 16, 2012

Monday Listicles: 10 Things I Said I'd Never Do

She said: So, your topic (should you choose to accept it) is: "I'll Never...": The Top Ten Things You Said You Would NEVER Do And Have Caught Yourself Doing.

I don't know why she thinks parenthood would cause us to frequently eat our words. Oh, wait, I so do. So here it is:

Ten Things I Said I Would NEVER Do (as a parent) And Have Caught Myself Doing:

#1. Feed my kids junky "kid food." HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! If you've been reading this blog for any length of time you will know that Ethan rarely eats anything but. He is going to turn INTO an organic hot dog someday, because he eats so many of them. And? He considers the color green in a food to be indicative of it being POISON. At least he eats. I've got a friend whose son hates just about everything, including pizza.

#2. Make separate meals for everyone, be a short order cook in my own home. I even once said "I will make one family meal and if the kids don't like it they have a choice of a peanut butter sandwich as an alternative or nothing. And once they are old enough they can fix it themselves." Wow, was that a lifetime ago! I thought things would run so orderly in my house. That was before autism and special diets and THESE particular children landed in my home (and heart). Because letting your (nonexistent) children go hungry in theory? Not at all the same as watching your already too skinny actual child eat nothing and be fine with that.

#3. Lose my evening time to the kids, every night. I have a very organized, disciplined friend who had kids long before me. I thought she did a great job with them, and asked for lots of advice, thought I could just copy her parenting tricks and all would go as smoothly in my house. She had told me: "9 PM is when kid-time is over in my house. They can stay up later if they want, but in their rooms and quietly. After 9 PM is grown-up time in the common spaces." What a lovely philosophy. And COMPLETELY impossible in our situation. The boys share a TINY room and Jake crashes at 7, while Ethan can not ever fall asleep before 10, often later.

#4. Ask my kid the soul-killing question "What is WRONG with you?" OK, I am REALLY not proud that I crossed this line once. It was Ethan (of course) getting on my very last nerve, doing something completely ridiculous over and over and ignoring my request to stop. Something I thought he REALLY knows better, and aught not to do at all. Before we had identified ADD and poor impulse control were just a part of his makeup. Sigh.

#5. Let my body go to hell. Yes, B.C. (before children) I had looked at a formerly skinny friend of mine who'd had a kid and thought: "Geez, it's been 3 years, shouldn't that gut be gone by now?" HA! It's been over NINE years now that I have been resembling a Weeble, with no end in sight.

#7. Let my kids watch too much TV. This is a REALLY hard one. I HATE how much the TV is on, in our home. It goes against everything I believe in, how the kids should be doing REAL things, engaged in the world and with other people. However, with this particular set of kids? "Engaged" with each other? 99% of the time that means fighting. Yelling, screaming, hurting each other. It's the autism. And it sucks. But they will both sit peacefully together in the living room if the TV is on. And sometimes (OK, a lot of the time) I really, really need peaceful.

#8. Completely lose touch with the culture that I love - movies, theater, art, music, avant-garde performance. When I was a young woman in New York City's Off-Off Broadway, Performance Art, and Independent Cinema world, I had older friends with kids who brought them along to all sorts of unusual and avant-garde events and I thought: "Yes, that's how I'm going to parent! No Disney dreck, "kid-culture" drivel for my offspring! I will open and expand their minds at a young age." HA HA HA! I wasn't counting on autism rendering one of my kids perpetually much less mature than his biological age. Nor his brother's insistence that all this culture stuff is BORING. Sigh. I haven't been to an art opening in 9 years.

#9. Tell my kid: "I'm cold, you need to put on a sweater." Yup. Well, I did expand on that and add: "and it's really, really cold out and I know you don't feel cold yet, but you will soon, and I don't want you to catch a chill." And it WAS really, really cold out! But still...

#10. Spit on a napkin and wipe my kid's face with it. Well, in my defense, his face was REALLY, really dirty! (Hangs head in shame.)

aaaand that's all folks! What's on YOUR list of backpedaling?

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I am Squashed!

About Me

I am a mother, a wife and a writer. I have a set of 12 year-old twin boys, one of whom is on the Autism Spectrum, while the other has some ADD (as do I). Until recently I was also caring for my elderly, widowed mother, who just passed. Life is exhausting, but interesting. I mostly write about autism, parenting and grief, but I also have a wicked sense of humor, and tell tales from my past.